The relevant law
5.There is nothing disputed or ambiguous about the law, so I can set it out briefly. 6.Disputed facts in civil proceedings are proved on the balance of probabilities. In Re B (Care Proceedings: Standard of Proof) [2008] UKHL 35 Lord Hoffman said:“If a legal rule requires a fact to be proved (a ‘fact in issue’), a judge or jury must decide whether or not it happened. There is no room for a finding that it might have happened. The law operates a binary system in which the only values are 0 and 1. The fact either happened or it did not. If the tribunal is left in doubt, the doubt is resolved by a rule that one party or the other carries the burden of proof. If the party who bears the burden of proof fails to discharge it, a value of 0 is returned and the fact is treated as not having happened. If he does discharge it, a value of 1 is returned and the fact is treated as having happened.”7.As the Court of Appeal observed in Re W-A (Children: Foreign Conviction) [2022] EWCA Civ 1118, it is commonplace for a court in public law proceedings to admit into evidence relevant findings made in previous proceedings involving the same parties. Not only is such a finding admissible, but it is evidence with presumptive weight; otherwise, as Peter Jackson LJ observed, “there would be no purpose in admitting it. It would be meaningless to treat it as ‘just another piece of evidence’.” 8.It is of crucial importance in public law proceedings that the local authority’s presentation of its case is accurate. In Re W (A Child) (Adoption: Delay) [2017] EWHC 829, [2017] FLR 1628 a local authority had included within its final care plan the words, “the local authority considers [the father] is likely to have caused physical harm to [the children]”. In fact, at an earlier hearing the District Judge had dismissed one of the local authority’s two allegations of physical harm, and the other was not pursued. Nevertheless, the allegation of physical harm persisted within the local authority’s corporate memory and was later presented as fact to prospective adopters and to the father’s employer, with the result that he lost his job. The then President of the Family Division, Sir James Munby, was highly critical of the local authority’s “cavalier approach to the facts and disregard for precision.”